Pop Music and the Press (Sound Matters)

Rating:
Summary: Fact Check, NOW!
Review: In this collection's lead essay--one of those long, portentous titles with a colon--the author (and the editor of the collection)Steve Jones, by way of explaining "authenticity" to us, in the most pretentious and leaden language imaginable, quotes, at some length, Lester Bangs writing about the Count Five's LP, "Carburetor Dung." The problem with the quote is that there is not nor has there ever been an album by the Count Five called "Carburetor Dung." Furthermore in Jones' citation of him, Bangs "quotes" lyrics from a Count Five song that doesn't exist. The lyrics are pure Bangs as is the description of the music on the album that doesn't exist.

Nice illustration of "authenticity", no?

I'm the type of person that once I see something like this in a book's opening pages, my radar automatically tunes to acute and--what do you know--a few pages later Jones has Bangs writing about Van Morrison's "Astral Weeks" for a "fanzine" called STRANDED. The problem is that STRANDED was a mass-marketed book (I think there are two editions of it?) edited by, I believe, Greil Marcus (or maybe it was Robert Christgau) wherein several rockwriters were asked to do an essay on what LP they'd take with them to the proverbial desert island.

Sometimes the medium is the message, no?

Although much of the rest of this collection is plagued by the decidedly unrock, neo-pedantic language of post post-modern academia, Robert Ray's essay is good as is the one by the poet who entered the Jewel website poetry contest, but as I read I kept thinking, "Well, if the EDITOR got this stuff just plain WRONG in HIS essay . . ."